-- Sir Francis Bacon
There are those who would not consider the College of Physicians of Philadelphia a holiday highlight, but they would be unlikely companionship for those of us who require more than sand and sunshine to drag us away from the peculiar delights of our everyday life in San Francisco. "Collphyphil" offers much more, with neither sand nor sunlight to temper the impressions carried home.
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia -- established in 1787 by 24 prominent Philadelphians, including John Morgan, founder of America's first medical school, and Benjamin Rush, whose signature appears on the Declaration of Independence -- is not a university, as the name might suggest, but an educational society that offers lectures, workshops, and panels to academics and the general public alike. The society also maintains one of the largest collections of medical history resources in the country, including more than 20,000 rare physical specimens, many of which are available for viewing within a portion of Collphyphil known as the Mütter Museum. It's the Mütter that has piqued my interest from nearly 3,000 miles away.
Currently under the care and direction of Gretchen Worden, the Mütter Museum began in earnest with a contribution of "anatomic and pathological materials" from society member Thomas Dent Mütter, then professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College. According to Worden's exquisite coffee-table book Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the professor had begun gathering his peculiar samples to teach medicine based on physical observations when physiology was still in its adolescence. When failing health forced him into retirement in 1856, he offered the society 1,344 of his treasures -- including the bladder stones of Chief Justice John Marshall, removed in 1831 by the "father of American surgery," Philip Syng Physick -- along with $30,000 for their adequate accommodation.
The museum is housed in an imposing building on 22nd Street, behind a tall wrought-iron gate just a short distance from the Swedenborgian church Worden attended as a girl. A gleaming marble foyer offers entree into a sitting room, a library, and two reception halls draped in baroque fabric, overlooking the medicinal plant garden. Beyond all this, in a sublevel room styled after a Victorian operating gallery with first-floor balconies, lie the medical exhibits, muffled in a tasteful twilight of sanguine carpets, rich wood paneling, and soft illumination. As one gazes down from the ornate balcony, the Mütter's main floor appears as a common shop of horrors -- papier-mâché gore, plastic entrails, waxy heads with horrible deformities, ghoulish things floating in jars of murky liquid. But as distance shrinks and seconds pass, details begin to emerge -- the heavy lids and parted lips on a coronal slice of a woman's face, which make her look as if she is just waking from a nap; the arrangement of hands and feet on a skeleton of twins fused at the head and thorax, which hints at an easy embrace between the siblings; a tiny, perfect seashell ear pressed against the glass jar in which its twisted body floats -- and the difference becomes clear: These subjects have not been unsympathetically manipulated to enhance their misfortune, but lovingly arranged to emphasize their humanity.
There are the famous "Siamese Twins" Chang and Eng Bunker, who, in spite of the fact that their livers were connected, kept separate homes with different wives and 21 children between them. (Upon their death, at the age of 63, they were autopsied at the Mütter Museum, where full-body casts were made and their conjoined livers preserved.) And Madame Dimanche, a Parisian laundress who was 82 before she got someone to remove a 10-inch-long cutaneous horn growing out of her forehead, and hanging down to her lip. (She had already had removed a finger-sized horn from her cheek and another from her thumb before a doctor was able to commission a dermatological wax model, one of nearly 300 at the Mütter.) And the Balloon Man, an unfortunate 29-year-old who became constipated at the age of 16 and left upon his death a colon of utterly phantasmic proportions, which has been dutifully preserved and tastefully lit alongside a black-and-white portrait of the otherwise slender fellow. And Yvonne and Yvette McCarther, who were joined at the head but possessed different brains. (After earning money for medical expenses by showing the girls in a circus, their mother brought the twins home and raised them with their other siblings. Discovering they had different career goals, the McCarther sisters embarked on a relatively successful gospel-singing career, then enrolled in nursing school. They died at the age of 43, a few months prior to their graduation.) And the young, doe-eyed man with multiple enchondroma, pictured in Worden's book with hands and feet like colossal ginger roots, whose photograph is accompanied by a note that reads, "He is 20 years old, walks with crutches, wears home-made cloth shoes. He thinks himself handsome."
After a little while, the curved spines, cleft palates, club feet, and congenital limb defects do nothing to repel. Rather, they invite investigation, as Mütter intended; fascination and compassion, as Worden expects.
"We all have bodies," says the director with a loud, easy laugh. "And everyone here is so unique."
Worden, who could easily pass for a button-down relative of Wednesday Addams, leads me past a skeleton she affectionately calls "Harry" -- an example of fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, which allowed bone to grow over his skeleton like ivy, rendering him immobile -- through a storage room, and into her office, where large drifts of mail teeter on the verge of a postal avalanche.
"Requests," says Worden motioning to the pile. "And offers."
Since the Mütter cannot afford to prepare the exhibits, it depends on its donors, like "Harry," to make the arrangements. The skeleton of the 39-year-old Philadelphia native arrived at the Mütter some 30 years ago, about the same time as Worden, in whose hands it could be of maximum service. Under Worden's care, Harry Raymond Eastlack's bones have illuminated and awed both doctors and artists at the museum and abroad. Scott Lindgren and Olivia Parker are just two of the internationally published photographers who have chosen the bone pathology section of the museum as the subject of their prints. Other artists, like Joel-Peter Witkin, Shelby Lee Adams, Harvey Stein, and Max Aguilera-Hellweg, have also been granted permission to photograph the exhibits over the years, infusing the medical specimens with their own passion, wonder, humor, and silence. All of the photos appear in Worden's strange and wonderful book, along with simple black-and-white portraits of the patients as they lived.
At the Mütter, it's quite possible to let the "specimens" speak for themselves.
As I make my way back to the museum through the cluttered storage room, I notice a dusty bookshelf strewn with miscellaneous detritus and, on the bottom shelf, a jar with a small pink fetus floating in liquid. I stoop to touch the glass, noting the perfectly shaped fingernails and tiny little nose, forgetting entirely to ask Worden about the hundreds of letters she receives annually for Dr. Gigante Colon, and taking away, instead, something a little more significant.
